Matthew Grabelsky
‘Kiddos’

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We are excited to welcome back Matthew Grabelsky for his seventh solo exhibition with our gallery. ‘Kiddos’ will feature a collection of 15 new oil paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Grabelsky. His works combine a hyperrealistic painting technique with a surreal penchant for unlikely juxtapositions. By contrasting the platitudes of the day-to-day with the presence of the extraordinary and unlikely, Grabelsky stages the unexpected within the most unassuming of circumstances.

The appearance of the animal head feels distantly totemic, an archetype for something primordial, ancient, and psychologically motivated. Fascinated by the persistence of animal imagery in mythology and communal cultural imaginaries, Grabelsky superimposes its presence onto his depictions of the contemporary world. For the artist, the animal becomes a manifestation of the inner workings of the hidden subconscious, literally revealing the latent identities and motivations lurking beyond the composure of the human mask.

Technically inspired by 19th Century academic and naturalist painters, Grabelsky creates these unlikely, surreal scenes with a staggering degree of realistic detail. The contrast created between the visual verisimilitude of the works, and the surreal improbability of their content catches the viewer in a prolonged moment of convincingly suspended disbelief.

Artist Statement:
I titled this new body of work “Kiddos,” and it features paintings of kids with animal heads doing things that kids do. Childhood is a particularly primal period of all of our lives. A time that is all about the id, when strong emotions and passions reign supreme, before every decision becomes thought out and overanalyzed. It’s also a time, or it was for me anyway, when most of who we become as adults, our character and interests, is established. As such, I thought it would be interesting to explore this age through the lens of my animal-head motif using it a way to see into kids’ minds.

I’ve painted kids with animal heads before, but previously almost all of them have been set on the New York City subway. For this show, I decided to depart from that location. I’ve placed the characters in settings that relate to the animal that they are portrayed as. A dog at a dog park, a squirrel in a tree, an elephant in a pool, etc. Like in my subway paintings, where the clothing, details in the train car and station, and objects they hold relate to the animal, here the settings and clothing link with the animal. These details are meant to tell a story in a humorous way about who these kids are.

Stylistically, these paintings take my work in a new direction. I’ve been thinking a lot about image making in the age of AI and what laboriously and lovingly making oil paintings by hand means to do. For me, it’s all about process. My ideas develop and change as I work on a painting, and the final piece goes in directions that are almost always richer and more interesting than my original thought. I wanted to show that in the works, so while I rendered the central figures in my customary way with precise detail, I let sections of the underpainting process show in parts of the picture away from the central focus. These paintings are thoughts, and this approach is meant to capture how they develop over time, all fixed in single painted image.

On view August 8 – August 29, 2026